A key requirement of today’s fast changing business outcome and innovation environment is the
ability of organizations to adapt dynamically in an effective and efficient
manner. Becoming a data-driven decision-making organization plays a crucially important role in addressing such
adaptation requirements. The notion of “data democratization” has emerged as a mechanism with which organizations
can address data-driven decision-making process issues and cross-pollinate data
in ways that uncover actionable insights. We define data
democratization as an attitude focused on curiosity, learning, and
experimentation for delivering trusted data for trusted insights to a broad
range of authorized stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a general
indicator framework for data democratization by highlighting success factors
that should not be overlooked in today’s data driven economy. In this
practice-based research, these enablers are grouped into six broad building
blocks: 1) “ethical guidelines, business context and value”, 2) “data
leadership and data culture”, 3) “data literacy and business knowledge”, 4)
“data wrangling, trustworthy & standardization”, 5) “sustainable data
platform, access, & analytical tool”, 6) “intelligent data governance and
privacy”. As an attitude, once it is planned and built, data democratization
will need to be maintained. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through a case study for a
Cameroon based start-up company that has ongoing data analytics projects. Our findings
advance the concepts of data democratization and contribute to data free flow
with trust.
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